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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

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What do folks on the Motte think of the "Waves" glasses? Here is the link, quoting the short tweet:

introducing Waves, camera glasses for creators.

record in stealth. livestream all day.

pre-order now.

The idea seems to be another in the long string of VC-funded tech companies who seek to make their name on being controversial in the beginning, and slowly becoming socially accepted. It's extremely frustrating that this profit model seems to work, but we can't deny it does (some of the time) at this point.

On the one hand I'm deeply incensed at the thought of other people recording me without my consent. On the other hand... we already waived these rights two decades ago with the Patriot Act, effectively allowing the government and major corporations to spy on us all the time with no repercussions. I personally find it hard to be sympathetic to outrage against these glasses when our nation's legal system has completely bankrupted any notion of a personal right not to be filmed anyway.

I'm not sure which side of the culture war this benefits either. As it stands, it seems a pretty predictable evolution of trends we've been seeing in privacy and technology for a while in the West.

Microsoft used to sell a very geeky product that was basically a camera on a pendant. It took a photo every 5 minutes to create a ‘life diary’. I quite liked the idea and it would be cool to have an updated product that could function similarly - at the moment so much of life just disappears into the fog.( What were you doing three days ago? How much do you remember?)

Obviously uploading these images to social media is where the trouble comes in IMO. It would also need a ‘do not record’ for private matters.

Stills at a rate of one per five minutes is much less of a privacy nightmare. I mean, you probably should not wear them for most jobs, but recording full video with sound is much more likely to catch material which will go viral.